I had some bother finding tyres for my old bike and it seems to be a rare thing.

I bought the bike new in 1990 whilst studying for my A-Levels. I decided at the time to choose a bike with no particular style as I didn't want it to go out of fashion. 19 years on it needed new tyres, so I went down to the nearest bike shop to get some.

The man in the shop did that sucking air through his teeth thing and then went around the back to have a look. They had some, but they were surprised about it. They didn't have inner tubes of the right size, but had some that would fit if I drilled out the rims.

After doing a bit more research it appears that my Peugeot is one if the last bikes to be made to the old French measurements. There's a French society dedicated to preserving the tyre size, and it's going to be almost impossible to get spare parts. At the time I just fancied the idea of a traditional French bike.

Recently I've been thinking about making some improvements to it as it's not the most comfortable bike in the world - the frame is a bit small, the handlebars are too low and the saddle is agony. I bought a new saddle but having done some investigation I don't think I should change it much more. It's the only Peugeot I can find with sturmey archer gears and one of the last bikes with 650B wheels.

This is probably a bit geeky again, sorry. I was just thinking about going out for a proper (more than a few hours) ride on my bike and perhaps adding a few more gears when I discovered this. C'est la vie.

So that got me thinking as is the usual case... What would be the best touring, as in a proper ride, bike. It looks to me like it might be the Thorn Raven or perhaps a Nomad with a Rohloff gear hub. Mmmm nice! Obviously I should be able to make Ringwood or Verwood without breaking a sweat before thinking about such things and surely a tuba would be more useful waste of the same money (I don't have).

You have to do something with your brain whilst on holiday. Why hasn't somebody invented a way of not wasting money?

I've just downloaded the subversion repository of Muse Score. I'm downloading the build dependencies at the moment. Might go for a compile in a few minutes. Muse Score is music typresetting software for Linux, Windows and Mac.